11 June 2026 | In September 2021, a coalition of Western Balkans civil society organizations published an Open Letter to EU institutions, warning that the Western Balkans Investment Framework (WBIF) – the EU’s main blending platform for the region’s infrastructure – lacked the governance structures needed to responsibly manage the newly launched €30 billion Economic and Investment Plan.
The European Court of Auditors’ Special Report 16/2026 on EU infrastructure investment in the Western Balkans, published this month, reads as a systematic confirmation of those concerns.
- On project maturity: Auditors found that the Commission pays insufficient attention to project readiness, resulting in average start-up delays of 17 months. The 2021 letter had already flagged shortfalls in handling the governance challenges that affect project preparation.
- On public procurement and integrity: Auditors found the Commission unable to identify problems in how procurement procedures were supervised. Civil society had explicitly warned in 2021 that fundamental issues – corruption, conflict of interest, public procurement, rule of law – were not factored into the conditions governing EIP delivery.
- On conditionality and benchmarks: The ECA finds that monitoring information was not detailed enough, and concluded the Commission failed to require evidence of risk mitigation from financial institutions. The 2021 letter had called out the absence of specific benchmarks or accountability mechanisms conditioning project financing.
- On monitoring results: ECA points out that the Commission has not carried out any results-oriented monitoring visits to check the transport projects and has no direct knowledge of how they are performing on the ground. The 2021 letter put it plainly: Western Balkans citizens will assess infrastructure’s usefulness immediately, because they will use it – or not – every day.
None of this should be surprising. Western Balkans civil society organisations bring irreplaceable knowledge of local contexts, actors, and governance realities. That knowledge is actionable intelligence – the kind that can prevent billions in EU and taxpayer money from being wasted, and ensure infrastructure actually delivers for the people it is meant to serve.
The ECA’s recommendations now provide a clear roadmap for the WBIF. The 2021 Open Letter pointed to a concrete part of the solution: embedding specialised civil society organisations into WBIF governance mechanisms. The audit findings show precisely what happens when that independent, on-the-ground oversight is absent.
